BLACK COMEDY
Orange Tree Theatre
★★★★
“farcically over the top – but that’s what it’s all about”
There is something intrinsically satisfying about watching somebody dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. Witnessing others’ misfortunes – especially in a theatre environment – isn’t driven by cruelty. Psychologists and philosophers have written pages on the subject of ‘schadenfreude’, but most of us enjoy the sensation without giving it a second thought. Which is why television shows like ‘You’ve Been Framed’ are popular. Farce is funny. It works best by putting ordinary people into extreme, out-of-control predicaments; the humour coming from watching them try to maintain their dignity and hide their secrets, while all around everything is falling apart.
Playwright Peter Shaffer certainly knew how to tap into this concept when he created the characters for his 1965 one-act comedy “Black Comedy”. And then he added another trick, borrowed from Chinese theatre, where he would reverse darkness and light. The play, set in a young sculptor’s South Kensington flat, opens in pitch black. When a fuse blows plunging the flat into darkness, the stage is illuminated. We see everything, while the characters are stumbling around in the dark. What ensues is seventy-five minutes of joy, watching the disintegration of order coupled with seeing how the darkness reveals truths that the characters manage to hide in the light.
A simple but ingenious conceit made trickier by playing it completely in the round: the expertise required by the cast is magnified, yet they pull it off superbly. Fledgling sculptor Brindsley (Joe Bannister) and his fiancé Carol (Leah Haile) are preparing to meet a rich and influential art dealer. Anxious to impress, Brindsley has ‘borrowed’ some expensive antiques from his neighbour Harold (Simon Manyonda) without his knowledge. Meanwhile, Brindsley’s former mistress, Clea (Patricia Allison), is threatening a comeback, while Carol’s father – Colonel Melkett (Jason Barnett) – has arrived to check out his prospective son-in-law. Teetotal neighbour Miss Furnival (Julia Hills) enters, seeking refuge from her fear of the dark.
Caroline Steinbeis, making her directorial debut at the Orange Tree Theatre, handles the intricacies and the chorographical demands with panache. Aided by physical comedy consultant, John Nicholson, the fast-paced chaos unfolding on stage feels natural despite the precise and intricate blocking required. Occasionally things fall out of synch, but we barely notice amongst the intentional mayhem. Bannister has faultless comic timing, pitching pauses perfectly during which we can almost hear his brain working out how to get out of the next mess he’s found himself in. Haile’s Carol is teasing and playful, a willing accomplice to her fiancé’s deceptions, simultaneously rebelling against her military father while wrapping him around her finger. Barnett gives a gentle giant of a performance as the colonel; imposing but bumbling, regimental in his speech but betraying a taste for subversion.
The laughs increase in tandem with the number of people onstage. When Harold returns early, much of the humour derives from Brindsley’s doomed attempts to replace all of his belongings before the lights come back on. Physical comedy comes to the fore, around which Manyonda – as Harold – dances with a camp joie de vivre, until it turns to gleeful horror when truths are revealed. Hills is a delight as Miss Furnival, accidentally discovering the joys of alcohol in the darkness. Allison is a gorgeously impish Clea, who delights in the advantageous observer’s position in which she finds herself. A mischievous smile follows her every movement and sentence – it is clear she is relishing the chaos. When Schuppanzigh the electrician (Chris Chilton) arrives, he is mistaken for the rich art dealer in a wonderfully slapstick, though slightly predictable, comedy of errors. The real art dealer has barely more than a walk on role, but Javier Marzan makes the most of it.
A whirlwind of a show, it works well up close. Dangerously up close for the performers, but they use the audience to great and comic effect. It is farcically over the top – but that’s what it’s all about. As a play, “Black Comedy” is as light as they come, and great fun. A reminder that, at times, theatre is simply pure, joyous entertainment without needing to be anything more.
BLACK COMEDY
Orange Tree Theatre
Reviewed on 27th May 2026
by Jonathan Evans
Photography by Sam Taylor
